Brandwatch React has had a solid year, enlightening over 600,000 individual readers with our exclusive data-driven stories.

In case you weren’t sure, React is a sub-brand of Brandwatch that’s interested in telling stories with our data on anything related to pop culture and public affairs. You might know us by our data visualizations and tweets, but our blogs are where the most action is at.

In the spirit of celebrating our successes, we thought we’d look back on five data stories that made the biggest splashes this year and how they came to bring in the number of readers they did.

Brandwatch React’s biggest hits of 2017

5. United Airlines Mentions Exceed 1.5 Million in a Day As Passenger Dragged From Plane

United Airlines saw a large (and negative) reaction on social media after footage surrounding a man being dragged from one of its planes went viral in April.

Brandwatch React chart shows spike in mentions of United Airlines when the passenger was forced from the plane, with 1.5 million in a single day.Our post hit the front page of Reddit, sending nearly 20k people to read our report.

Read it here.

4. Doctor Who 13: How the World Reacted to the New, Female, Doctor

BBC’s beloved Doctor was announced to be regenerating, with a brand new person playing the role. But some people didn’t seem too impressed.

We found that the disappointed reactions were largely in the minority despite the negative press covfefe, with only around 20% of the sentiment-categorized mentions being negative.

16.6k upvotes on Reddit and a helpful tweet from @CaitlinMoran later, and we had 25k views.

Read it here.

3. Data Reveals the Extent of the Backlash to the Kendall Jenner Pepsi Ad

This was another April big hitter for the Brandwatch React team.

Redditors were happy to upvote our story that provided data on the magnitude of the reaction against Pepsi’s controversial ad, bringing us nearly 45k readers.

Brandwatch React topic cloud shows top words in relation to the Kendall Kenner Pepsi ad. Tone-deaf is in the centre.Read it here.

2. Things Millennials Are Killing, According to Twitter

We noticed that Millennials’ murderous ways had become a bit of a meme in itself, so we decided to give it the Brandwatch React treatment.

Bar chart shows that chain(s), Buffalo Wild Wings and industry(ies) are top things Millennials are apparently killing.It didn’t take long for the post to hit Reddit’s front page, bringing in 100k Millennial-curious readers looking find out what was at the top of the list.

Read it here.

1. Thousands React to Mario’s Nipples in Super Mario Odyssey Promotion

When we started the year, I didn’t think that an article written speedily that covered (or uncovered) social’s response to Super Mario baring his nipples for the first time would be our most read blog post of the year, but that’s the internet for you.

Visualization shows that 66% of gender categorised authors discussion Mario's nipples were male.A well timed Reddit post launched a trickle of interest that soon became more than a quarter of a million views. I’m told Brandwatch now ranks on Google for “super nipples”, although I wouldn’t advise you search for it.

Read it here.

And all without spending a single dollar on promotion

Well, just our wages…

We didn’t spend any money promoting the above posts at all, but there were a couple of common factors at play.

Firstly, they each feature data that adds value to conversations as opposed to just adding another voice. Having access to a social listening tool like Brandwatch, which can produce exclusive, insightful data on almost any subject, makes it much easier for our content to get noticed. Brandwatch also makes it easier for us to track how our content is doing and find out when our it’s taking off on social.

Secondly, we posted them on Reddit and they took off big time. By no means does posting your content on Reddit get you thousands of blog posts every time (in fact, prepare for failure most of the time). But sometimes you get the right subreddit at the right time and you’re rewarded heavily. Just don’t read the comments.

We put together a number of posts on how to succeed at using Reddit for promoting your content this year. You can find one for beginners here and one for those sold on Reddit’s potential here.

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